10.21 beta 1 is here – since this is the first beta of 10.21, you have to run the updater by hand and check “get betas” to see it.
This will be the only 10.21 beta, so please go try it now. Give it a quick once-over if you make custom scenery or a custom airplane. We’ve tried to put in a whole pile of low-risk bug fixes, but better to test than find out that something went wrong the hard way.
Release notes here, bug report form link is on the right.
One note about KATL: this update contains Tom’s KATL building layout, which is built entirely out of library components. It lives in the “Global Airports” custom scenery pack – this scenery pack will grow over time to contain all airports submitted to Robin’s global airport database.
very cool that airports will now start being updated in
What a nice birthday present!
On Atlanta:
Interesting development. I’ll need to take a look when I get home. I wonder if that means a new WED is also coming soon…
It is – I am battling on that now.
With the new WED, can you make the exclusion tool be a poly tool rather than a box? It’s a pain drawing a ton of those boxes for a back country airstrip and it makes it very difficult to get it to look just right if it’s cut out of dense forest. Thanks
No. The requirement for the box comes from X-Plane.
Bravo indeed. I’ve got 3 dozen airports lego-brickified with only default library objects ready for submission. (Feel free to reach out if more test airports are needed)
Between this and the movement towards OSM updates, y’all are starting to eat away at some of my key concerns…
good!
any plans for fixing this:
SASL ERROR: Error updating avionics: not enough memory
–=={This application has crashed because of the plugin: SASL}==–
(happens on x-pl & win both x64)
Yes. We will take over memory management of LuaJIT on Windows. Not until 10.30. The fix is quite major and needs real testing. SASL should not need a change – it is ready for this. I will write a longer post later to explain what’s going on.
glad to know this issue will be addressed in the future
at this time, at least 1 out of 3 flights ends up with a crash to desktop.
thanks
Great update, finally seeing something being done with auto-gen and default airports are finally seeing buildings and objects. Happy to see a lot of great things being done at LR.
I have a few concerns about the following and hope they will be addressed soon:
– Clouds, sky colors, will we see any updates to this soon? The clouds look pretty bad
– Daytime colors look very dull and washed out, lack of saturation and color
– Would like to see lighting sliders added to the rendering options so we can set all the lighting options, such as runway lights, taxi light, car lights, street lights, etc. Since everyone has a preference on what looks the best when flying at night.
– Water has a very flat look from a distance, needs some sort of texture or something to make it look like actual water, and if you notice if you are looking out towards the horizon, where the ocean is suppose to meet the sky, you don’t see a horizon line at all, it looks like the sky and ocean are one. Need to be more prominent.
I know you guys are focusing on certain things but would like to point these out.
Wouldn’t call this a bug, but is anyone else getting a 25% drop in FPS?
As you can’t deactivate single airports from the “Global Airports” folder (only the complete folder), what will happen if you have a default global airport (e.g. KATL) and the same airport as a custom airport?
I hope that the sim will use the custom airport whenever it finds one and ignore the global airports folder then. Because if not, this would require to deactivate the entire global airports folder.
Maybe in the long run it would be better to have the Global Airports folder not in Custom Scenery, but in Global Scenery, so users don’t get confused.
It depends on pack prioritization. Generally if you install the custom airport after the globals are in place, the custom will be defaulted to higher priority. There is an .ini file that controls this which we will someday but a UI in front of.
We can’t put the overlay global airports in global scenery (but I would have liked to) – they would load _under_ custom base meshes, which would be bad.
I noticed that KATL is located in a new folder called Global Airports. Will all of the crowd-sourced airport building layouts submitted to Robin also appear in this folder? Also, How will we be able to turn off individual airports in this folder without disabling the rest of the airports contained in folder? Or is this folder somewhat special?
Anyways, I’m just curious about this since the question sorta came up on the xsimreviews blog.
1. Yes they will all appear in there.
2. You cannot turn off individual crowd sourced airports. This is consistent with the current behavior (you cannot turn off individual crowd-sourced apt.dat layouts either).
You can do a few things, if you don’t want one of those airports:
1. Install custom scenery and set it to higher priority – see my comment to Mario.
2. If you just don’t want anything, make a scenery pack, draw one exclusion zone in WED, go home happy. 🙂
3. If you don’t like 3-d, the default airports WILL obey the object slider settings.
Ben, it’s kind of hard to be excited about a new beta when the second item in the lengthy list is about the King Air’s windshield wiper. Release notes should focus on significant upgrades to the sim — what makes it a new beta — not upgrades to the sim aircraft set. Corrections to data….same gripe. Not beta. Just sayin….. 😉
Your statement about release notes is incorrect. Release notes should list the things that changed in the sim from the previous version, so that users who are waiting on changes, or who have reported bug fixes can see what happened.
Users reported a real bug (Kingair wipers animate wrong). We fixed it, we released it, we have to release note it. If we don’t, then those users have to email me and go “Did you fix it?” for every single beta, which is a waste of time for the bug reporters and for me.
10.21 was, in general, not designed to make you excited — it was designed to _fix bugs_. That’s why it is 10.21 and not 10.30!
(Well, technically the deciding factor here was things we though we could fix with a short beta cycle.)
Fair enough, Ben. I know this is pretty much a Raid release, but I was kind of expecting a bit more meat. I desist… and go find more love for 64 bit X-Plane. 😀
And on that note, it looks like there were some changes to the C172 but those changes were not listed. Any chance we can find out what those changes were? 😉
Ooops — yes, the C172 was “modified by Austin at the request of your employer.” 😉 You’d have to ask him exactly what he did…
Just an observation, Ben, to extend this one more step in hopefully a better direction than I chose at first. Jeff ran into something that was changed but not documented.
It seems that not everything that’s changed gets into the release notes, and as a result, when a new “beta” comes out, and people test it, they find new bugs where bugs didn’t exist before. Hence, you or Austin changed something and didn’t document it.
A beta test is of less value if what’s changed in the sim is not fully disclosed. Why should Jeff have to ask *anyone* else about the changes to the C172? He and his employer are not the only users, and your reply to him surprises the heck out of me.
It’s irrelevant who requested a change. Just document the fact, not the reason if need be. Not documenting changes only creates mystery and distrust, and we see these mysteries time and again on the .Org.
Maybe the list will get ridiculously longer than it’s been should you opt to change LR’s practices based on this suggestion. But changing something and waiting to see if someone has problems makes more angst for all.
The whole reason I started this reply thread was because I saw something that looked ephemeral and you rightly corrected me. But I now think that my initial itch is because I’ve noticed the problem with the release notes that I’m now mentioning, and perhaps that deserves a bit of process tweaking between yourself and Austin. The windshield wiper was just the straw that urged me to say something. I’m sorry, this is what I should have posted first.
Documentation of X-Plane is a long standing challenge, but for the beta testing program to have it’s best successes, and there have been many, you really need to document *every* windshield wiper that you change, so to speak. In being corrected, I now realize that what would really be awesome is for release notes to be more complete than perhaps they have been. Windshield wipers are important, but if *anything else* gets touched, it deserves mentioning too. Specific and professional mentioning, by the way, not “just tweaked xyz feature just a touch to make it absolutely perfect.”
The better the beta program interface with the testers communicates what’s going on, the better and more quickly will you get specific questions on what was touched. Good or bad.
And above all, thanks for this blog. Being able to interact with you here is one of the best things you’ve got going for the beta program. The newsie bits are great, but when those that beta test read something here, they know better what needs to be verified.
I agree that the release notes should contain all changes to the sim.
The inclusion of KATL seems to give a glimpse of the future of X-Plane airports. And the future looks very good!! Is there any review done before an airport is included? Just curious about quality control for submissions. Will the Aerosoft airports be eventually rolled into the Global Scenery pack also?
Until you have a UI for the text file that manages priorities perhaps you can include a pdf of instructions in the Global Scenery folder. That would save looking up the instructions every time.
Robin looks over submissions to try to catch gross mistakes; if two people submit layouts he looks at them both, picks a winner if they are radically different in quality, or emails both authors to resolve a merge if they’re both solid.
The aerosoft non-custom airports (the ones that are only use of library) will be merged; the aerosoft airports with custom art assets will remain as is.
I did a quick take off and fly over KATL – it’s looks great!
Is it a bug that an AI aircraft clipped through a building while taxiing?
Depends – the taxi routes should hopefully not put airplanes through buildings but there is no pushback, so a plane at a gate will often go a little crazy trying to get _on_ to the taxi routes.
A couple of questions; to make a “lego brick” airport what libraries should show up in WED ? If I understand, the lego brick airports use (only) a defined set of resources supplied with X-Plane, so this excludes (obviously) libraries like ruscenery and opensceneryX (how about stuff like chris k’s wide lines) ? How does the scenery author “set up” WED to do a lego brick airport ?
On a different topic, if making payware scenery, can the author use these resources ?
thanks,
1. Re: libraries – right now, as of WED 1.2b1, to be safe you’d want to set your x-system folder to a non-customized version of X-plane, or keep a shadow second custom scenery folder to hide third party libs.
I do have a note to put some filters on WED to show only certain kinds of library entries, e.g. only non-lib, only default lib, etc.
2. Yes – since you use the resources by reference and not by copying, you can make a payware scenery that uses our lego bricks via the library system.
You cannot copy the textures and art assets of our lego bricks into your own pack though.
Ben, since we can’t copy or modify lego assets is it possible that some assets be moved into /lib so that they are available to us? For example, I noticed some facades at KSEA aren’t listed in WED (SEA_4Panel.fac, 6, 9, 18, etc).
Thanks!
We will grow the library, but it wasn’t really a goal to let authors make their custom scenery out of our custom scenery.
My intent was to use them for lego submissions, as more variety never hurts. Thanks though. 🙂